Rockwell Kent, “Sun, Manana, Monhegan,” 1907, oil on canvas Image courtesy of Bowdoin College Museum of Art

At Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the exhibition “Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island: The Monhegan Wildlands” (through June 21) takes a novel approach to a familiar subject: the speck of land 10 miles off the mainland that has been an artist colony since the 19th century. This is not your usual survey of Monhegan artists.

I suppose that in times of strife, it’s a natural human impulse to look for larger meaning wherever we can find it. But I cannot help thinking that this show has valuable lessons to teach us about our current moment in history. Essentially, the exhibition looks at the art of Monhegan Island through the more expansive lens of the ever-morphing habitat of the island.

We learn, for example, that when Rockwell Kent arrived on Monhegan in 1905, he found grassy slopes covered in dandelion and wild strawberry and “a dark spruce forest” inland from the coast. We also discover that, as the exhibition catalog points out, “the island that so exalted him was, in fact, in the earliest stages of recovery from its greatest human disturbance… a legacy of livestock farming.” The 19th-century settlers had cleared substantial swaths of the perimeter to accommodate grazing, chiefly of sheep.

Jamie Wyeth, “Islander,” 1975, oil on canvas Collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum

In this light, Jamie Wyeth’s “Islander,” a 1975 canvas of a sheep taking in the view along the cliffs, acquires the character of a cautionary tale. The ram’s elegant profile dominates the left side of the painting, while behind and to the right all we see is grass-covered hillside and blue water… nary a tree in sight.

Another human incursion — the importation and subsequent removal of deer — also had considerable impact on the island’s complexion. Balsam saplings now pop out of the ground in Cathedral Woods, and kitchen gardens, largely absent since the early 20th century, have reappeared now that the deer’s appetites (particularly for tulips) no longer affect planting (interestingly, note the catalog authors, “paintings and photographs can be dated by the presence of certain flowers”). We see some of the earlier gardens in Mary Stuart Mason’s “Sidney’s Garden,” Constance Cochrane’s “Monhegan Garden in Bloom” and Edward Willis Redfield’s “The Toy Maker’s Home” (all painted at the turn of the 1920s into 1930s). Deer ticks, too, are mercifully no longer a serious threat.

Constance Cochrane, “Glory of Fall,” ca. 1930 Collection of Stephen S. Fuller and Susan D. Bateson

Other scourges to the ecology of Monhegan were natural, such as invasive barberry, or the parasitic Eastern dwarf mistletoe, the latter having distorted branches (also referred to as witches’ brooms) and led to the death of huge stands of white spruce. In the exhibition, these witches’ brooms are readily apparent in the photography of Accra Shepp (“Whitehead from Burnt Head” of 2022) and Barbara Petter Putnam’s hauntingly sumptuous woodcuts of 2023 displaying lethal tangles of branches and roots.

Barbara Petter Putnam, “Monhegan-5,” 2023, print on Mura Kaji (a Thai Kozo paper) Image courtesy of Bowdoin College Museum of Art

All is not lost, however. Through the efforts of the Monhegan Associates, established by a group of islanders at the urging of Thomas Edison’s youngest son, Ted Edison — who had been buying up large tracts of land to preserve in perpetuity — the island’s Wildlands have been the focus of conservation efforts and research since the mid-1950s. It has been a full-scale community effort, involving everyone from assessors and fishermen to artists and summer vacationers.

Edward Hopper, “Monhegan Landscape,” ca. 1916-19, oil on panel Image courtesy of the Johnson Museum

Artists, as always, have been there to witness and chronicle the cycles of evolution. One of the show’s great strengths, however, is that it goes beyond the usual suspects to make its points. Of course, we recognize many names here: Kent and Wyeth, naturally, but also George Bellows, Lynne Drexler, James Fitzgerald, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Samuel Peter Rolt Triscott, Stow Wengenroth.

Accra Shepp, “Barry’s Trees,” 2023 Image courtesy of the artist

But there are also anonymous and not-so-anonymous photographers (Edward Knowlton, Edward Robinson, Shepp, Triscott, Bertrand Wentworth). We discover the work of less recognized women painters (Cochrane, Stuart Mason and Maud Briggs Knowlton who, along with Alice Swett, were the first two women painters on the island). And we encounter other artists more briefly associated with the island, such as Aaron Draper Shattuck, who visited in 1858 for long enough to create visual evidence of human deforestation of the Wildlands to provide pasture for livestock.

Samuel Peter Rolt Triscott, “In the Woods,” ca. 1900, watercolor Image courtesy of Monhegan Museum of Art and History

My favorite work in the show is by another relatively obscure name: Andrew Winter. The wall label for his “Monhegan Twilight” of 1943 reminds us of the painting’s context. It was World War II, during which the lighthouse was dimmed, the Coast Guard surveilled the headlands for enemy submarines and the mail boat was conscripted for military service.

I love the painting because it is stunning — dramatic and moody, palpably mournful in its lack of human presence (save for a single male figure who had not, like many of the island’s male population, been enlisted for battle overseas), silent and still, darkly impressionistic. But it also speaks of the consistent succession of human experience, how it is repeated and innovated, how we simultaneously progress and regress as a civilization, move from war to peace to war again.

One passage from the catalog stands out for me: “When given the opportunity, New England forests, and landscapes elsewhere, exhibit a remarkable ability to renew and sustain themselves. This is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than on Monhegan. Its Wildlands embody what is possible when a community commits its resources to preservation and values wilderness. The prevailing stewardship ethos of Monhegan Associates to allow natural processes to unfold with minimal human intervention brings with it a need to reconcile oneself to change.”

Bert Poole, “Monhegan, ME.,” 1896, lithograph Image courtesy of Library of Congress

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus understood this as far back as antiquity when he observed that, “The only constant in life is change.” You would be hard-pressed to find another universal truth that is as easy to corroborate in human history. Our refusal to accept this reality, or our presumption that we can control it, leads to all sorts of strife. It is clear in our vehemently polarized contemporary times that the impulses to divide ourselves into us and them, and to return to some mythic ideal of how things were is not only dangerous and irrational, but also ignites primitive fears and behaviors that feel, in terms of our humanity, regressive.

Bone harpoon, Monhegan Image courtesy of Monhegan Museum of Art and History

Making the best of change requires a choice. As with the ethos of the Monhegan Associates, we can choose to let what is organically arising and developing within human culture to proceed naturally. Of course, we can also choose to act from our baser instincts of fear and survival, which favors the individual over the species, and which exploits resources — both ecological and human — for short-term gain.

Artists will continue to record the outcomes of these choices. We can only hope that their artistic expressions become evidence of our flourishing rather than our annihilation.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island: The Monhegan Wildlands”

WHERE: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 9400 College Station, Brunswick

WHEN: Through June 21. The exhibit moves to the Monhegan Museum starting July 1.

HOURS: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday  (Thursday until 8:30 p.m.) and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday

INFO: 207-725-3275, Bowdoin.edu